Sure, where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see, but you should probably hang on to yours anyway, because guess what: Event Horizon just might be coming to TV!
Variety has reported that Amazon and Paramount Television are currently developing an adaptation of Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 gory horror classic. (If you haven’t seen it, just imagine Hellraiser meets Alien meets…uh…Hausu.)
According to Variety, Adam Wingard (who’s behind the smart, subversive slasher You’re Next, the smart, subversive thriller The Guest, and the less-smart, less-subversive live-action Death Note adaptation) would direct and executive produce. Additional executive producers for the potential series include Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin, who both produced the original Event Horizon, and Jeremy Platt.
Here’s the movie’s TV Tropes synopsis, for the uninitiated:
In the year 2047, a signal from the starship Event Horizon is picked up on Earth. The ship had disappeared without a trace beyond Neptune seven years earlier. The ship has reappeared in a decaying orbit around the planet Neptune, and the rescue ship Lewis and Clark is dispatched to investigate. The ship’s crew is commanded by Capt. Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and carries the Event Horizon‘s designer, Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill).
No definitive trace of human life is found; inconclusive sensor readings lead the Lewis and Clark‘s crew to enter the Event Horizon to search for survivors. Things start to go very wrong very quickly, it appears that someone—or something—is toying with them. Strange noises echo throughout the ship, sensors indicate the presence of life forms even though the vessel is clearly deserted, and what few records the Lewis and Clark‘s team recover hint that something went terribly wrong… and that’s just the beginning. Before long, the question is no longer what became of the Event Horizon, but what has the Event Horizon become?
BIG SPOILER AHEAD. Rot13ed.
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I am so freaking sick of gbegher cbea! And so grateful that it’s easier to avoid TV shows that make me sick than it was back in the age of cable. There’ll be no accidental tuning in to this one.
Hey, if y’all don’t mind…if sometime in the future you want to do a “Best Corpse Art” post for this one, or whatever? No pictures above the cut, big please? Even the one you chose for this one is pushing it. Signed, somebody with applicable triggers.
That was a movie I both liked and disliked. The setup was great, but I still remember one critic at time, Roger Ebert if memory serves, saying, “There was a lot of foreboding and a lot of afterboding, but very little actual boding.”
It will be interesting to see what they do with this, assuming that it actually gets made. Event Horizon is a movie that tends to frustrate fans because it comes close to being a great movie, but stumbles and ends up being a movie with an intriguing set up and lots of potential instead.
Meh. I can’t help but view the original film as a failed attempt at horror (as opposed to visceral disgust, which it moderately succeeds at {strangely, they edited out scenes that were ‘too graphic’ but would have strengthened the only thing it had going for it}). I had hoped it might be good science-fiction, but it wasn’t – it was a gothic haunted house story set in space with gore added.
At least the Alien movies are science fiction combined with horror and action, respectively. And reasonably successfully, if your standards aren’t set especially high.
I’m confused as to how this *can* be adapted to an ongoing production. It’d be like trying to turn a teen horror flick into a series – where can they go from the initial premise?
I feel so silly now – I actually really liked the original film…
Between this and the Eisenhorn series currently in development, eight-pointed stars are finally getting their day in the sun :)
I wonder if the series will change the date? For a movie in 1997, 2047 feels reasonably far in the future; but a horizon of under 30 years is less so.
That’s not quite the same as an objection-to-the-premise that might be summarized as “I can believe the chief design engineer would fall prey to demonic influences, and convince the design board it’s all a good idea, but I can’t believe Earth would have a space infrastructure of this scale during the 21st century, even at SpaceX speed.”
so I liked the movie, bringing to tv will be a challenge, but good potential![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
You guys should do a “Five books that do Event Horizon better than Event Horizon did”, please! I’d love to read a scifi/horror mashup with Lovecraftian badness taking place on a lost ship. I was hoping to get something like that out of Salvation Day, but while the book was good, it wasn’t that.
@1 Event Horizon’s not a very good movie, but it’s definitely not torture porn. That comparison’s so off it borders on the bizarre. I mean, it sounds like maybe you don’t like horror at all, so I’m not sure why you even clicked.
I can believe the chief design engineer would fall prey to demonic influences, and convince the design board it’s all a good idea
I never got the sense that Sam Neil’s character knew what was going to happen. Although I think that would have made it a better movie. If the ship was deliberately designed to serve as part of some ritual to contact the “other side” that would explain a lot of things that otherwise don’t make sense, starting with the insane interior layout of the Event Horizon itself. It looks like occult symbols are carved into every surface because that’s actually what they are…
Except it wouldn’t be a science fiction work if it brought in explicitly magical content. There’s only so much you can do by pretending your demons are aliens.
@11 There are hybrid novels.
Anyway, Lovecraft’s demons are, for the most part, aliens.
@12: And so they’re not demons. Event Horizon presented itself as being a science fiction film, but it really wasn’t – the SF was just theatrical backdrop, like in Star Wars. The alien dimension isn’t just some continuum with a greater tendency towards entropy, it spawns entities that deliberately seek to torment. It’s a haunted house that leads to a Renaissance vision of Hell that happens to be set in a ship orbiting Neptune.
Campbell famously wanted aliens that thought as well as humans, but differently; he wanted aliens that weren’t just humans in a weirdly-shaped body. Aliens can’t be demons in weirdly-shaped bodies, either. Lovecraft’s monsters weren’t concerned with humans at all, and his perspective was about as different from the human-centric worldview of people who believed in demons as is possible.
Okay. Not really sure how to, or if it’s worthwhile to, continue having a discussion with someone putting hard rules not only on genre, but also one how you can and cannot taxonomically define entirely made up creatures.
@11,13: I’m not really into strict genre definitions, but if you want to draw the line that way then I guess my feeling is that Event Horizon would have been a better film if it had leaned even further toward the “gothic horror set in space” end of the spectrum as opposed to the science fiction end.
Steven E. McDonald wrote the novel….
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2843398-event-horizon
An adaptation of Paul Anderson‘s Event Horizon?
I havent read the novel but according to my informations you should write an adaptation of Steven McDonald‘s novel
@15: I have to agree. A large part of my unhappiness over the film was that it gave the initial appearance of being something it wasn’t. *Sphere* had many of the same problems of not really making sense, but it was at least consistent in the sort of story it was telling.
Mixing science fiction (even defined in the broadest sense) with religious supernaturalism simply doesn’t work. The underlying methodologies aren’t compatible. You can have religion in a science fiction story, just as you can have it in secular horror, but not if overtly miraculous things happen. *The Haunting* is a perfectly acceptable horror movie, but it’s not SF.
As hard as I find it to imagine making a series, at least I can hold onto the hope that they’d take the basic premise in a very different direction.
Generally speaking, sci-fi and the supernatural are an awkward fit, but mixing the two can occasionally work. Ghostbusters is a good example. Are they ghosts and demons? Or are they interdimensional creatures/aliens? The movie shrugs and has it both ways, because you can get away with it in a comedy. A harder sell in a “serious” movie.
There’s absolutely no science in Ghostbusters. Pseudoscience galore, but not the slightest hint of science. It’s purest fantasy. Back to the Future isn’t a very good science fiction work despite being a very good film, but it’s better than Ghostbusters, in the same way that 0.001 is bigger than zero.
Likewise, the SF elements in Event Horizon are just stage dressing, and really have nothing to do with the story. The setting could have been changed to any mundane Earthly setting without disturbing the story.
Pseudoscience is science enough for me when it comes to movies. (And #14 was right, it’s not worthwhile).
@17:”Mixing science fiction (even defined in the broadest sense) with religious supernaturalism simply doesn’t work. The underlying methodologies aren’t compatible. You can have religion in a science fiction story, just as you can have it in secular horror, but not if overtly miraculous things happen.”
That’s quite the claim to make, and I’d suggest it’s a baseless one. At the very least, science fiction in the broadest sense includes science fantasy as a sub-genre. I also find myself doubting the sincerity of anyone who refuses to consider the Warhammer 40000 setting to be science fiction of some kind.
It’s increasingly clear our definitions aren’t compatible, with makes it pretty hard to have a meaningful discussion.
Warhammer 40K is a technofantasy. Science fiction can step beyond the bounds of our known science, and it doesn’t need to involve the more technical and physical sciences, but that setting has no real interest in any of them. It’s just Warhammer IN SPACE! Which makes for fun gaming and reading on its merits. We don’t need to attach an inaccurate label to justify it.
tbh I’m not sure we NEED an Event Horizon TV show, but I’ll try and be optimistic! I loved the movie. “It’s a haunted house movie but in spaaaace” was very fun, the Event Horizon herself is unreasonably spooky, and I ship Sam Neill with his ghost wife spaceship. People always talk about the extra gore being cut (which I am fine with, it’s at perfect gore levels, shocking but not overdone) so I don’t know much about what edits were made that caused the movie to be worse but I understood it just fine. You have to go in with an open mind of things being spooky Just Because. I love having no explanation for why the engine is Like That. Why is it so edgy? How does physics work where in order to fold reality you need a tunnel of blades leading to your murder engine? No wonder it opened a door to a dimension of puuuure chaossss *cough The Warp Cough*
I’m with Porphyrogenitus on the science fiction + supernatural discussion. Smash up them genres! Combine some conceits! Science fiction is a broad genre and I feel like making a hard line about what genres “can’t” be combined with each other is uncool, and stuffing a lot of really complicated stuff about genres, trope, conceits, etc. into a tiny box that’s too small for it.
Anyway here’s hoping that the Event Horizon TV show will make me yell and cackle like a madwoman like the first time I watched the movie.